Users of distributed networks are able to communicate in “real time” (meaning almost instantaneously) through the use of programs which receive and display text input to multiple users simultaneously. These displays are known as “chat rooms” or “chat sessions” or just “chats”. Chat sessions have been used extensively to facilitate customer service, live sales assistance, collaborative research and online interactive training between users of distributed networks, such as the Internet. A chat session interaction is a natural extension of browsing a web site, and companies, organizations and institutions who host web sites can obtain many benefits by providing chat sessions to customers, potential buyers, researchers and students. A chat session interaction is particularly beneficial if it can be combined with the ability to direct one or more web browsers during the chat session event.
However, adding chat session administration, browser control and other enhancements is a quantum leap from the much simpler work of web site administration. In addition, web site owners have no way of reaching out to customers, potential buyers, researchers and students to invite them to enter a chat session, except to incorporate invitational material for permanent display on the web site. Such permanent invitations can be easily ignored or missed.
Web site owners need a way to add enhancements to how they manage their relationship with users browsing their web site, such as chat session administration, browser control and other enhancements, without the quantum leap in administration, programming and hardware required. For this purpose, Internet relationship management enhancement service providers, herein referred to as service providers, offer to provide Internet relationship management enhancements to a web site owner through their own web interactive administration, programming and hardware systems. A web page owner desiring to make relationship management enhancements available to users who are browsing through the owner's web pages, becomes a customer subscriber to the service provider, and provides approved hyperlinks on the web site pages to the service provider's various services after a sign up process that sets up the web page owners preferences. The service provider then maintains all the web servers and applications necessary to provide relationship management enhancements, such as chat services and a variety of CRM, communications, marketing, sales, support, and education services, to the owner's web site, and an owner does not have to, and generally cannot, maintain and modify program code or hardware locally (beyond that needed for interaction with their own web server).